The world is getting very much more competitive.

Since those don’t hit financial reports, the opportunities you had but didn’t accept, most people don’t bother thinking about them very much. At least that is a mistake we don’t make. We rub our own noses in our mistakes in blowing opportunities, as we just did.

It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past -- and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.

Stock-picking is like gambling: those who win well, seldom bet, but when they do, they bet heavily.

I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.

Trying to prioritize among things we're unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.

We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.